A REAL Day in the Life of a hackNY Fellow

Preface: After our previous post “Day in the Life of a hackNY Fellow” we learned two things: the first was many people do not know a lot about the New York City startup community, and the second was that many people wanted to know more about what it is really like to be a hackNY Fellow. Here we discuss, in full seriousness, what it is really like to be a hackNY Fellow.

This blog will follow Jennifer Rubinovitz, a hackNY Fellow working as a front-end engineering intern at Skillshare, and Amy Quispe, a hackNY Fellow working on tumblr’s platform engineering team.

8:30: Wake time. Most of the hackNY fellows live in a dorm at NYU with a floor full of other hackNY Fellows really central to NYC, which is amazing. The morning people make breakfast and work on projects, the night people are crashing from working on their projects into the wee hours of the night. Pretty much everyone drinks coffee. Some days we get up earlier and go to yoga with other startup people.

9:30 : Walk to work.

10:00: We do a quick standup and get to work. We love the first ‘git pull’ of the day, when we get to see all of the things that changed since yesterday. CEO commits are our favorite.

12:00: Lucky for us our office is full of foodies and someone on the team is always going somewhere amazing for lunch and I tag along. On Fridays we always have lunch during the all-team. This is different everywhere, but something fun about working at a startup is seeing the team formation evolve, even over the short period of the summer.

3:00: Tweet about huge bug or a big fix and know Chris Wiggins is reading it. Actually, one of the ways that the fellows bond despite being at different places all day is through Twitter and Foursquare. We’d like to give a special shoutout to Terence, mayor of Palladium.

4:00: When we push code, we go through a code review process like anyone else. This is where a lot of the real learning happens.

6:00: Wrapping up if I do have a hackNY event that night. Otherwise we’d keep going. Sometimes I wonder if I spend 5 hours a day on StackOverflow and IRC. We’re given a workload similar to a normal employee, so it never feels like we’ve gotten enough done.

6:30: Head over to a talk at a local New York startup or coworking space (e.g. Foursquare, Tumblr, Hunch, FogCreek, Etsy, 10gen, AOL Ventures, Betaworks, Union Square Ventures) or at NYU.

7:00-9:00: We eat dinner with the other hackNY Fellows, mentors, and staff (and the occasional onlocation employee who wants a free dinner) and listen to and learn from anamazingleader in the NewYorkstartupscene.

9:00 We’re out. Sometimes we go out with other Fellows, or we head back to Palladium. Once a week, we have workshops taught by the other hackNY Fellows. We often end up working on cool projects together.